Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (A Nation Divided : New Studies in Civil War History) (Paperback)

by Ervin, L Jordan (Author) "THE EVERYDAY LIFE of slaves in wartime Virginia at first seemed unchanged..." (more)
Key Phrases: free black males, county slave, hustings court, United States, New York, North Carolina (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This exhaustively researched treatise will shatter some rose-tinted ideas about African American participation in the Civil War. Though original sources are incomplete and most written by whites, Jordan (Charlottesville and the University of Virginia in the Civil War) pieces together an astonishing portrait of slaves and free blacks in pre-and post-War Virginia. Of the 3.65 million blacks in the South, one in every six lived in Virginia, "a breeder state" where dealers boasted "Slavery is our business and business is good." By classifying blacks as Afro-Virginians, Afro-Yankees or Afro-Confederates, Jordan explores one of the War's most vexing questions: Why did some slaves and free blacks join the Confederate Army? Those "who boasted the loudest of their desire to fight Yankees," Jordan believes, "did so... in hopes of obtaining privileges within the confines of slavery." In fact, in Virginia the most revered slaves, body servants, did triumph by fighting Yankees-in 1924, that state provided for pensions to those body servants, hostlers, teamsters, cooks who "rendered service to the Confederacy." That $25 annual pension was paid to heirs as late as the 1950s. Yet perhaps most shocking is what Jordan calls the "Confederate paradox of humanity and inhumanity to blacks," like providing excellent medical care for enlisted men while making it legal to whip or execute slaves or free blacks for not showing proper respect, praying without permission or gathering in groups of more than five. Some slaves were allowed to purchase themselves, earn wages and own land, yet they could be lynched for "eyeball rape." "African-American history is not for the squeamish," Jordan says in his preface, and he is right. But Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees should be read by everyone, as a corrective to simplistic moralizing interpretations of the legacy of the Civil War. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Despite its unwieldy title and hefty price, this stout volume is an invaluable addition to African American and Civil War history, a meticulously researched and detailed collective portrait of the nonwhite population of Virginia, the leading state of the Confederacy. Beginning with a large, capable, and diverse African American population, free as well as slave, Virginia found itself, as fear warred with the need for labor, both increasing and decreasing restrictions on it. At the same time, that African American population, unanimously in favor of freedom and better lives, was thoroughly divided (yes!) as to which side it should support in order to achieve these goals. Not easy reading and clearly most useful to the serious history student, this is an eminently worthwhile candidate for U.S. history collections, nonetheless. Roland Green --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 476 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Virginia (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813915457
• ISBN-13: 978-0813915456
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,013,661 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truth Exposed, May 5, 2000

By	Jon (Dixie) - See all my reviews

Finally, the truth is exposed. Many African American Southerners fought for the South. This book is one of the first of it's kind.Although alot of this book should be re-edited, and he should re-check his sources, the basic idea is correct. Although I find it hard to believe that two whole regiments of Free blacks fought at Manassas, some did.

This book is a must read for any person interested in learning the facts, not propaganda.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Being Black in the South, December 26, 2003

By	Arleigh Birchler (Wisconsin, Illinois County, Virginia) - See all my reviews

It appears that a lot of people had a knee-jerk reaction to the title of Professor Jordan's book. This is far from an Apologia for the Confederacy. It is a very well researched and documented account of Black Experience in Civil War Virginia.

While working on my own family history I have been doing an analysis of the 1810 Federal Census for Spotsylvania County. What stands out is the number of Free Black households headed by women. In our politically correct age we tend to over-look the fact that in Colonial and pre-war Virginia, women and children owned property, and that the courts vigorously protected their property rights from husband and estate seekers. In both white and black households in Spotsylvania County, one out of six were headed by women.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good research, unfinished analysis, March 6, 2005

By	Edison McIntyre (Durham, NC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Jordan is to be congratulated for his wide-ranging research and for taking steps to address historical issues that tread on politically correct toes. Unfortunately, this is not a finished work of history. It is perfunctorily written, and the chapters are poorly organized. It contains some excellent information, but it is not a book for the casual reader or even the casual Civil War buff.

The antebellum South, and the Confederacy it spawned, was a complex place -- 9 million individuals, white and black, whose support of, opposition to, or acceptance of slavery and secession stemmed from a thousand different motives. If one can generalize about the slave South, it is to say that an attitude of white supremacy and black inferiority prevailed among its white citizens (as it did in the North); and that African-Americans, both slave and free, who lived in the slave states were subjected to a stifling degree of legal control by slave owners and state governments. Jordan goes over these two major points -- already familiar to students of the era -- in the first section of the book, "Uncertain Trumpet." The breadth of his research is commendable, but his technique of relating it is a bit numbing; a string of paragraphs, each a topic sentence and several redundant supporting anecdotes, is hardly historical analysis, much less a readable narrative. Some of the anecdotes are powerful -- e.g., a slave mother is haunted by the sound of her owner's piano, purchased with the proceeds from the sale of the slave's daughter -- and the author would have done better to concentrate on those, to examine their meaning more closely.

The most controversial parts of the book are in the second half ("Give Us a Flag") and deal with black Virginians who served the Confederate cause either by taking up arms in its defense or voluntarily supporting the white soldiers who did. As have many other authors (including Confederate apologists who continue to deny that the Civil War and the Confederacy were essentially about slavery and racism), Jordan cites numerous anecdotes about black Virginians fighting with Rebel forces or serving as cooks, teamsters, servants, musicians, laborers, and in other noncombatant roles in the Confederate armies and government. He also supplies a fair amount of anecdotal evidence for a deep split among white Southerners over the propriety of arming slaves. Even as the Confederacy was sliding to destruction in the spring of 1865, many whites were adamantly opposed to the tardy steps taken by the Confederate congress to organize black fighting units. This ongoing opposition from all corners of the Confederacy -- not to mention the overall pattern of racism and subjugation of blacks in Civil War America -- calls into serious question the value of the anecdotal evidence often cited to "prove" widespread African-American support for the Southern cause, because it implies widespread white gratitude for this support. Examining this topic alone would have been a worthwhile book. As other reviewers here state, Jordan could have done a much more thorough job in testing this anecdotal evidence.

There seems to be little question that some African-Americans supported the Confederate war effort, including military service, even before 1865. But to what extent? To what military effect? Did the arming of some slaves, or the volunteering of some blacks for military or quasi-military duty, have any widespread impact on the racial and political attitudes of white Southerners? Were these "Afro-Confederates" genuine Southern patriots, or infrequent exceptions to the repressive laws of racism and slavery, or simply black men and women who sought to ingratiate themselves with their white owners and the white community? These are questions that Jordan raises in this book, and that's a start. I hope he'll spend some time and a couple of other books trying to answer them.